Champion of Freedom

Friedrich A. Hayek has weathered the storm of three decades of collectivist domination of economic thought, the hero of engagement after engagement, and has survived to survey a battlefield on which the tide of battle has begun to turn. The influence of economist-publicists like John Kenneth Galbraith on public policy is certainly still enormous; but in the academic world, the Keynesian and quasi-Marxist doctrines which reigned supreme for so long are today under the sharpest criticism among economists. The up-and-coming men in the profession, the most brilliant contributors to the journals are more and more economists of the Chicago School and of the Austrian School— followers of Hayek, of Frank Knight, of Ludwig von Mises.

Professor Hayek’s new book, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago, $7.50) is a monumental summation of the ideas for which he has fought and of the analysis through which he has arrived at those ideas. It is a fitting successor to the volumes of economic analysis (Prices and Production and The Pure Theory of Capital) which established him as the outstanding theoretical critic of Keynes in England in the thirties; to The Road to Serfdom, which struck a clarion note against British socialism and American welfarism alike in the forties; and to Individualism and Economic Order and The Counter Revolution of Science, which dug deep to the roots of the scientistic and collectivist ideology of the twentieth century.

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich A. Hayek has weathered the storm of three decades of collectivist domination of economic thought, the hero of engagement after engagement, and has survived to survey a battlefield on which the tide of battle has begun to turn. The influence of economist-publicists like John Kenneth Galbraith on public policy is certainly still enormous; but in the academic world, the Keynesian and quasi-Marxist doctrines which reigned supreme for so long are today under the sharpest criticism among economists. The up-and-coming men in the profession, the most brilliant contributors to the journals are more and more economists of the Chicago School and of the Austrian School— followers of Hayek, of Frank Knight, of Ludwig von Mises.

Professor Hayek’s new book, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago, $7.50) is a monumental summation of the ideas for which he has fought and of the analysis through which he has arrived at those ideas. It is a fitting successor to the volumes of economic analysis (Prices and Production and The Pure Theory of Capital) which established him as the outstanding theoretical critic of Keynes in England in the thirties; to The Road to Serfdom, which struck a clarion note against British socialism and American welfarism alike in the forties; and to Individualism and Economic Order and The Counter Revolution of Science, which dug deep to the roots of the scientistic and collectivist ideology of the twentieth century.